Spatial analysis of the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area and social and environmental management issues

This paper hopes to fill this gap by working with the notion of environmental justice and by introducing hydrographical systems as an important level of analysis, together with the municipal and metropolitan scales. In that sense, the environment figures as the basis to correlate social, economical and infrastructural data. Through these three levels of spatial analysis it is possible to develop and to support a more comprehensible study of urban development of the Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Area. The aim of this study is (a) to develop an alternative spatial analysis leading to a more comprehensive understanding of the urban development process and its correlation not just with political-administrative borders but also to ecological systems: (b) to identify the correlations between infrastructure and socio-economical data in the Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Area (c) to evaluate urban development dynamics in the period between 1990 and 2000, based on the application of the above-mentioned data to the three spatial levels in question. This paper highlights the role of the hydrographical systems of the Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan Area as an important spatial unit of analysis to understand the metropolitan urban development and dynamic process. The natural landscape (mountains, beaches and bay), determined in this study as the hydrographical systems, is a particularly prominent element in Rio de Janeiro reinforcing the spatial segregation and at the same time creating contradictory conditions and social scenes. The ocean front is historically the wealthiest region of the metropolitan area and is visually and physically separated from the Rio de Janeiro suburbs by mountains characterising a schism between two cities: the ocean front extensively provided with environmental amenities and the suburbs marked by environmental degradation. This condition is true, but the metropolitan dynamic goes beyond that schism and this analysis reveals the dichotomy and contradictions of the hydrographical systems where wealthy and low income neighbourhoods divide the same ecological system and deal with their environmental degradation. Thus, this paper highlights the Rio de Janeiro intra-metropolitan inequalities through a documentation of the direct correlation between the spactial distribution of social segments of the population, infrastructure provision and location of hazardous facilities against the background of the natural landscape. This paper argues that this GIS based analytical methodology has the potential of supporting planning and policy-making in the Rio de Janeiro Metropolitan area. Paper published on a CD.